I recently read an absorbing memoir written by George Clare in 1980 called “Last Waltz In Vienna” in which he tells about his proud family and the murderous effects the Anschluss in Austria in March of 1938 had on it and other Jewish people in the succeeding years.

I mentioned it to my long-time friend, Steve Brener, a former publicity director for the Dodgers and co-owner of a prominent sports-oriented public relations firm called Brener Zwikel, because I recall him once telling me that his parents both were victimized by the dark horrors that spread through Europe during the 1930s and 1940s.

“I know my mom was in Auschwitz for a time, and that my dad was in Siberia, but I’ve never heard them talk about it,” he said.

“It’s just something they don’t discuss …”

I understood, but I was determined to talk to these people who might be able to remind all of us who muddle through life in security and comfort and possessions just how dangerous man can be when evil forces are able to appropriate a country.

We here in America were stunned by the bloody gruesomeness that struck NewYork on Sept. 11, 2001, but so many of us still remain blissfully unaware of the bitter realities of a cruel world in which each succeeding day that dawns outside our window can smash our lives.

We who sit blithely detached in our living rooms observing the daily ballet of death in the Middle East, who spend more time concerned about performance-enhancing drugs than we do about terrorists who are determined to destroy us, who live in a cocoon of self-deception in regard to the immutability of our national safety as the Europeans once so disastrously did. How Lilliputian are our worries when measured against what Murray and Minda Brener had to endure, as I discovered to my sadness after finally meeting these aging Holocaust survivors the other day at the venerable delicatessen, Canter’s, in the Fairfax District.

We sat in a booth for a couple of hours, Steve Brener with his wife Lynne and his parents, who reluctantly related what they went through a long time ago in a faraway land that was turned into a theatre of the macabre by a madman named Adolf Hitler.

Brener’s mother, a tiny gray-haired woman with alert brown eyes and a keen memory, is now 83, but she was 20 in late May of 1944 when she and her parents, a brother and two sisters were forced to abandon their farm in Horincovo – it was then in Czechoslovakia but now is a part of the Ukraine – and squeezed into a cattle car with other Jewish people on a train that took them to Auschwitz.

“We never were fed and we had to stand until we got to Auschwitz,” she said. “How many days we were on that train, I don’t know. It seemed forever. Very, very uncomfortable, and a total feeling of hopelessness. We had no idea where we were headed. They never said anything.”

After disembarking at Auschwitz, she never again saw her parents and two sisters, both of whom had children, but somehow her brother would survive and she would come across him after the war in Budapest, Hungary. She was able to survive the notorious concentration camp 37 miles west of Krakow, Poland, in which an estimated 1.2million people were killed – 90 percent of them Jewish – but only because of the advice of a kindly lady.

“Because I was young, after a while – I was at Auschwitz at least three months – they assigned me to help stack the dead bodies up like you would stack logs,” she says. “I really don’t want to talk about it because I’ve shut that from my memory. Let’s just say death surrounded you every day. The smoke from the crematoriums hung over the camp all the time. You slept on three-level bunk beds made of boards, without blankets. Sometimes you slept on cement. You were always hungry. They’d give us a small bowl of soup with barely any vegetables in it once a day. There were people dying all the time.

“I do remember this Slovakian woman telling me that the people they assigned to do what I was doing always wound up being killed. And so I knew I had to get away from such duty, and one day I saw this long line of women and decided to get in it. Auschwitz was so crowded with people at the time that it was actually pretty disorganized. No one noticed I didn’t belong in that line.”

The women in that queue would wind up being transported on a cattle car to another concentration camp near Frankfurt, where they were forced to do manual labor, lifting cement bags at an airport construction site.

“You’d work every day of the week until the sun would go down, and that was a long time in the summer,” she said. “The conditions were awful No food. Again, death all around you …”

There were countless days that young Minda Markovic – that was her maiden name – thought for certain she would become part of it, even welcomed such a destiny.

“You became like a robot,” she said. “You don’t think. You don’t feel. You just survive.”

She soon would find herself transported to yet another notorious concentration camp, Ravensbruck, where more than 130,000 women passed through its gates between 1939 and 1945, 90,000 of whom didn’t make it out alive.

“They had you working all the time,” she says. “I don’t even want to talk about what I had to do.”

As the Allies began surging through Germany – she would hear bombs exploding nearby on a regular basis – Minda once again was moved, as she was marched with several hundred other prisoners to a nearby Ravensbruck satellite camp in the village of Malchow.

“It was hard for me to stand up during the walk because I was so weak,” she said. “But I knew if I didn’t, I’d be shot, or just left to die. So somehow I kept walking. It was the fourth concentration camp I went to.”

There are human beings in this world who, by some trick of divine presence, or unexplainable quirk of fate, survive the most horrifying tragedies. Somehow, Minda Brener did, as on May 8, 1945, the Russians showed up in Malchow to liberate her and the others who were able to emerge alive from such a grisly ordeal.

“I was skin and bones when they freed us,” she said. “I don’t think I weighed more than 50 pounds. I remember the first food we received were salted crackers and Spam.”

Not that the Russian soldiers were any more appealing than her German captors.

“The Russians didn’t care about us at all,” she said. “They were wild and crazy and stole everything they could in the village and raped a lot of the local women. It was terrible.”

With the assistance of various humanitarian agencies, including the Red Cross, Minda Brener soon would make it to Budapest, then to Yugoslavia, from where she was set to migrate to Israel before a relative sponsored her to come to the United States in 1949.

She would meet her husband a short time later in Los Angeles through a friend – they would get married in 1950 – and such a meeting certainly didn’t seem likely afew years earlier.

Murray Brener’s travails during World War II also were frightening. While he hurriedly departed his native Zdunska Wola in Poland in the fall of 1939 to get away from the conquering Germans, he didn’t exactly have a viable alternative.

As a secret appendix to the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop peace pact between Russia and Germany, the Russians also invaded Poland at the same time.

Twenty-year-old Murray Brener, a tailor and a Jew, already was quite aware what the consequences would be for him if apprehended by the Nazis. So he opted for the Russians, who promptly sent him to Siberia.

“It was the same as being in prison,” he said. “I worked in a fertilizer factory. It was cold all the time. Long, long hours. The food wasn’t any good. The conditions were just terrible.”

But Murray Brener had blue eyes and blond hair, and he believes his Slavic appearance was beneficial, as after one year he was able to get out of Siberia and spend the rest of the war working in other parts of Russia.

It wasn’t a pleasant experience, but he knows it could have been worse.

“That was a long time ago,” said the 88-year-old man softly, and tears fill his eyes as he relates how he never saw his father – his parents had divorced and his mother was living in America – again after he fled Poland, nor many other members of his family.

“I think sometimes in America people take their freedoms for granted,” said Minda Brener. “I remember as a child everything being so peaceful in our village. My dad was a farmer, and we raised everything. And then, suddenly, it was all taken away. And we were taken away.